Saturday, November 01, 2008

some onomatopoeia

The requests for treatment of various topics are still coming in much faster than I can deal with them. So here's one that goes back almost a year. Roxana wrote to say:

I teach English in Italy, and the books we use come from the UK. The other day I was a bit surprised to read a sentence in "English Files" that went like this: "Do you hoot if the driver in front of you is slow?" (not "toot") I would have said "honk".Have you come across this?

Yes, cars in the UK hoot (among other sounds) and in the US they honk (among other sounds), and those are but a couple of examples of the arbitrariness of onomatopoeia (words whose sounds imitate what they refer to). "The arbitrariness of onomatopoeia?" I hear some of you thinking. "Surely not!" But I reply "Surely, surely."

Onomatopoeia is always raised by some student when I teach the notion of 'the arbitrariness of the sign'--i.e. the notion that there is no causal connection between the form of a sign (e.g. a word) and its meaning. For example, it's just a social convention that the word for that thing in the middle of your face is nose. You had to learn to associate that combination of sounds with that body part because there's no other way to know that those sounds symboli{s/z}e that thing. And people who speak Zulu had to learn to match a different set of sounds to that thing because there's nothing in nature forcing us to use those sounds for that thing.

But surely, my student reasons, onomatopoeia does involve a natural relation between meaning and form (sound). We call the sound of a gun bang because guns go bang and so forth. Except, of course, that they don't. That's the way that the sound is represented in English, but in French it's pan (with the 'n' pronounced as nasali{s/z}ation on the vowel). And in Icelandic, apparently, it's búmm. While onomatopoeia is iconic, it still relies on the particular sounds that belong to one's language and it relies on some conventionali{s/z}ation. In English, our guns go bang and our bombs go boom because that's what we've learned from other English speakers, not just because that's what guns and bombs sound like. So there's some room for variation among languages, and even within languages, on onomatopoetic matters.

So it is with car horns. In both BrE and AmE, one might imitate the sound as beep, but (especially as verbs for making the sound) BrE likes hoot, which Americans reserve for owls, and toot too, and AmE likes honk (which can also be used for goose noises--OED marks this as 'orig. N. Amer.').

Here I must mention an absolutely charming website, bzzzpeek, on which children from around the world say the sounds of animals and vehicles. If you don't believe me on UK/US differences in onomatopoeia, check with the children. (The UK is the first country on each page, the US is the last--so it takes some clicking to get to.)

Here is a selection of onomatopoeia that I've come across in day-to-day existence. It's mostly come to the fore as Better Half and I clash in our sound effects for the song "Grover Murphy had a farm" (also "Grover Murphy had a bath", "Grover Murphy had some lunch" and anything else I can think to do sound effects for--but of course we use her real first and second name, which, as luck--or possibly careful onomastic planning--would have it, is metrically identical to "Grover Murphy" and "Old MacDonald").

donkeys: in AmE they say hee-haw, but in BrE eeyore--which is basically pronounced like hee-haw without the aitches (the penny drops for many Pooh fans--see the comments here)

frogs: the verb is to croak in both dialects, but in AmE (originally and chiefly, says OED) they say ribbit. This may have made it across the ocean now--Better Half was surprised to learn it's originally AmE, but the British bzzzpeek child has frogs saying croak croak.

emergency vehicles: in BrE children (or adults talking to children) sometimes call these nee-naws after the sound they make, which (traditionally) in Britain is a two-tone sound that's different from the sirens of the US (which are sometimes represented as woo-woo--but I've never heard that used as a noun to represent the vehicles, like nee-naw is). This one is not a case of the dialects representing the same sounds differently, but of having different sounds to represent. One might make the argument that hoot and honk are the same sort of thing--the British drive little cars that go hoot and Americans drive big ones that go honk. Except that the OED has BrE hoots and AmE honks back in the early 20th century, when the size of the cars would have been about the same in the two countries.

trains: we've already discussed the AmE origin of choo-choo and the BrE alternative puff-puff, which seems to be a bit old-fashioned now. BH doesn't use puff-puff, but does use (BrE) puffer train as an equivalent to (AmE) choo-choo train. Grover and I take the train to work/crèche, and as we wait for it, I find myself saying "Here comes the choo-choo train" then feeling ridiculous for doing so, since the train makes a kind of electric hum rather than anything 'puffy' or 'choo-choo-y'.

The thing that's struck me in thinking and talking to BrE speakers about these onomatopoetic items is that the American ones are mostly well-known here, but few people seem to reali{s/z}e that they were originally AmE. Considering how much disdain is felt for some AmE words in BrE, it's interesting that this section of the vocabulary seems somewhat resistant to that kind of prejudice. Or have I just missed it? And have I missed more onomatopoetic differences?

71 comments:

I don't know if you've come across any examples but occasionally it's possible for an onomatopoeia to affect the sound (rather than vice versa).

At first you might think that the French use of "atchoum" for the sound of a sneeze is a bit different from our "achoo". But if you listen to them very closely, you notice that they do close their mouths at the end of the sneeze and pronounce the M!

Ah, I meant to include atishoo (which I always hear as a tissue) versus achoo. Thanks, Mrs R.

I have Firefox and the bzzzpeek site works for me--though the main show comes in a pop-up window. You seem to have got that far, though, because that's where the t-shirt ad is. Click on the silhouettes of the animals/vehicles around the border, and that will take you to the pages for those sounds.

The 'honk' sound, geese aside, is the (or my) AmE sound associated with 'horns.' Since automobiles had actual horns (with a squeeze-bulb providing the pressurized air), the 'honk' label made sense. It's odd that subsequently car 'horns' are much different, and make much different noises (which I would use 'beep' to represent) one simple cannot 'beep' a horn, they must be 'honked.' Thus the descriptor seem more attached to the word 'horn' than to the sound. Does this make a lick of sense? If so, it might be an interesting way of looking at the evolution of these sound words.

I don't think "eeyore" is used in Britain other than in reference to the Pooh character. (Maybe he is referenced more often in Britain, though.) There's no OED entry for "eeyore", though there is one for "Eeyorish". The first citation for "hee-haw" ['the chants were interrupted at intervals with an Hiu Haw, in imitation of the Ass's braying'] is from a book published in London in 1815. (Called "Scribbleomania" -- read it on Google books if you can get past the scary hand)

In Ireland one always "beeps", neither "honking" nor "tooting". The varied terminology is allegedy confusing for Japanese

In the UK, the donkey sound is usually written "hee-haw" but generally pronounced "eeyore" (or rather "ee-aw").

I remember a comedy sketch about a planned police raid -- but can't recall now whether it was Smith and Jones or Hale and Pace. A petulant officer wanted to use his "woo-woos" on a raid.SARGE: No, it's a surprise raid. No woo-woos.OFFICER: No, if I can't have my lights and woo-woos, I don't want to go.SARGE: OK, look, you can have your lights on until we come round the corner.OFFICER: And woo-woos.SARGE: No woo-woos!

This was the first (and last) time my husband and I had heard anyone talk about "woo-woos", and we found it hilarious.

In our son's babyhood we had a spiffy vacuum cleaner (which was ultimately stolen), which had a so-called power wand, an attachment that was self powered and beat rugs as it vacuumed them. Our son referred to the entire machine as a "woo woo," and we took amongst ourselves to referring to the power attachment as the "super woo woo."

My parents made me read the French versions of Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke as a child, so I've long been familiar with the arbitrariness of onomatopoeia. "Woof" in French (comics) is alternately "ouah" (Milou), "ouap" (Idefix) or "ouaf" (Rantanplan). The boars in Asterix went "groin" or "grouink".

I heard a great factoid about "ribbit" (possibly on QI, but then that's where I've started to attribute most things I know...), which is that the only frogs that make a noise anything like "ribbit" are the ones that live in the area of the US that includes Los Angeles, and therefore the frog-noise heard in most Hollywood movies. Don't know how true/significant/relevant that is, but it's interesting...

The comment about the ducks reminds me of when my friends explained that in Chinese, a dog says 'wang wang' as opposed to 'bow wow' or 'woof woof.' I've never thought 'bow wow' was precisely accurate, but 'wang wang' seemed terribly foreign to me, although it may depend on the inflection (which I'm not sure about).

Then, when I was in a Spanish literature class, I discovered that Spanish dogs say 'guau guau' (sounding somewhat like 'hwow') and I thought that was a very apt onomatopoeia, although I don't think I've ever used it.

OK, the timing of your Eeyore comment is just scary. It was only about 9 hours earlier that, after driving past a donkey in a field, my own BrE BH made the "eeyore" noise - and "the penny dropped" for this AmE Pooh fan.

What about dogs? I was brought up to think of them saying "woof-woof" (or "bow-wow"), but nowadays people often use "ruff-ruff". Is that American?I'd never heard of "ribbit" for frogs until quite recently.

In Britain, we may say 'yum yum' or 'mmmm' when eating something delicious, but I'm pretty sure that 'yummy' as an adjective - and 'yucky' fron the sound 'yeuch' for something distasteful - are two of the most useful AmE imports based on onomatopoeia.

In 'The Wind in the Willows', Mr Toad stole a car that went 'poop poop' - evidently an early roadster, with a proper squeeze-bulb horn.

I had a French colleague who described an electronic alarm as 'il fait beep-beep'...

Increasingly people here (UK) appear to say, or at least write, "nom, nom" for something delicious, which I think is from the Caribbean.

I have often read in American children's books that the characters say "Ew" when confronted by something disgusting. I wonder if that is a literal rendition of the sound I would write "ugh" - and then I wondered whether the work "yuck" comes from a literal pronunciation of that word!

And both my siblings refer to their dogs as "the wows", probably dating from their days with or as small children.

German dogs say "wau wau" (pronounced wow wow). Curious as in German w normally has a v sound.

And I (ScE) have always known the cat sound as "miaow" rather than "meow". Is that a transatlantic spelling difference? I've had one or two set-tos with Americans over it!

PS Congratulations to all my American friends on last night's incredible events. I had tears in my eyes frequently, and actually gasped as Obama walked on to the stage in Chicago with his family, at the sudden making real of the fact that your first family consists of a woman who has never been fully proud of her country before and two lovely little girls who not so long ago, in the south at least, would have been referred to as picaninnies. Amazing. But off topic, so I'll stop now.

Ew is a drawn-out version of the vowel in 'pew'. To me, 'ugh' is pronounced 'ugg' though it can have a bit more of a fricative thing going on than a straight /g/. 'Yuck' is pronounced as it's spel{led/t}.

When my Liverpudlian colleague and I were studying children's antonyms, I suggested searching for 'yummy' and 'yucky'. He looked at me like I was a bit weird. (Not for the first time.) We were looking at American children's speech, so it was a reasonable thing to look for. (We didn't find any in our corpus, though.)

To me, "nom nom" wouldn't be repeated just twice as an equivalent of yum yum, but more often, as "nom nom nom nom nom" to show extreme approval of a morsel. It would need to be said faster than yum yum too, but this is getting a tad scary going into this much detail about things like this. A linguist's lot must be a surreal one at time.

"Nom Nom Nom" is, at least in my experience related to something cute eating. Generally something like a Hamster or a small bunny...as seen here:http://virtualhug.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/nom-nom-nom.jpg

I think it is pictures like this that started it's use more frequently...

Here in Northern California we use "num*" interchangeably with "yum*". E.g.:

"Yum, yum!" <> "Num, num!""That's YUMMY!" <> "That's NUMMY!"...etc.

[WARNING: POTENTIALLY ICKY ANECDOTE IMMINENT]The only instance in my memory contradicting the "num*=yum*' equivalency is: a friend of mine has a son who, until he was unusually old (I think around 4 years of age), she allowed to suckle at her breast. (Don't know if she was still expressing milk at that point - didn't ask, as I was a tiny bit taken aback by the information as well as by it being mentioned matter-of-factly in the course of an otherwise unremarkable conversation...that family is a bit...progressive, to say the least...) The point of all this is: the kid's code word for "I want to suckle" was a plaintive "I want num-nums!" I have never heard this in any other context (and never known anyone else who allowed a child to do that so long...sorry if too much information, but it seemed interesting and linguistically pertinent...).

I had the Eeyore revelation twenty years ago when I heard a real donkey for the first time while I was in Egypt. The animal had terrible gas and huge farts between braying, poor thing. I wasn't sure if a donkey only speaks when in pain, or if the gas problem was a standard thing with donkeys.

Hee-haw sounds more like doofy farmers laughing, maybe due to that show from the seventies (that I don't remember very well, but involved overalls and knee slapping).

I've been impressed with the nearly ubiquitous use of the letter m across languages in words meaning mother. This may be related to the nurturing (nursing) relationship between mother and infant.

Fascinating topic. My kids love Richard Scarry, especially his book of sounds. A helicopter says wuppa wuppa, a policeman's whistle says breet. I think there are definitely resemblances between many languages and the words they use to imitate sounds. Train sounds, chugga chugga choo choo, I think I can, I think I can. These sounds pretty much apply to steam engines though. The modern trains, well NY subways would be a hellish screeching, but the DC subways are more like a whoosh or hush sound. or Shoop?

This is fun!

I've noticed that the police, ambulance and fire-engines all have different sirens around here. The ambulance siren is very much nee-naw, nee-naw. The fire-engine more WOOOOOOOOoooooooooo-OOOOOOOOooo.

I'm looking forward to browsing around the bzzzpeek site.

It seems to me that dogs make different sounds. Sandra Boynton has a good kids book out with ten different dogs that make different sounds. Yap-yap, yip yip, nnn-nnn (whining, crying). It makes sense to me that "vov", if this is how "wow" is pronounced, the v is close to the f sound, which brings the word closer closer to woof woof or ruff ruff.

Whereas I pronounce the word "ugh" more like "Ew", but with a - is it called fricative? - at the end, like the Scottish "loch" sort of noise. Definitely not "ugg"!

And as for nom and num - when my daughter was a baby, my sister, then aged about 14, persisted in referring to my being about to feed her as "Time for Nemi-num-nums!" (My daughter's first name is Emily, hence the "Nemi").

The spelling "meow" for a cat noise was recently disallowed on Countdown as being the American spelling. The English spelling is "miaow".

I just proofread a (UK) crossword with the clue "Sound of a car horn" and the answer HONK. Then again, another crossword in the same magazine gave the answer TOOT for essentially the same clue.

It's been conjectured that "ma" sounds for mother are basic among humans, and ultimately stem from a baby saying "ah" (the most basic vocal noise of all) while opening and closing its mouth around a nipple. Similarly "n" sounds for rejection and negation stem from a closed mouth and pushing-away motion with the tongue.

Another one: "pshaw". As a child reading P.G. Wodehouse, I assume this was in fact pronounced "pish-aw", and was something that classy people would say. I never associated it with the sound "pffft", as an American might render it, the unvoiced fricative expression of disbelief and contempt.

My older US/UK dual citizen child never referred to a nee-naw, but to a dees-kah (aka police car; also intoned on alternating pitches: dees-kah, dees-kah, dees-kah). So all vehicles with sirens remained dees-kahs when his little brother came along. Frogs go bibbit in our house - this one from my British husband.

My Southern roots ensure that I am familiar with many onomatopoeic names for birds - bobwhite, whippoorwill etc. but apart from the cuckoo I wasn't aware of any British birds so named. That was until my mother moved down to Somerset and heard locals referring to the large green woodpeckers as yaffles.

I've heard of the British word "whinging" which I like a lot and I think, though may be mistaken, that it is onomotopaeic. Maybe someone can refine the meaning for me, but it seems to be some combination of whining and cringing- so it represents both and audio aspect as well as a physical movement. It has not caught on or even really come to American's awareness, I don't think. Great word, though.

As I was trying the bzzspeak site, I found that my cats were very interested in ALL of the cat onomatopoeia (coming close to the computer to try to hear what was going on) but they didn't react any of the others. I don't know what it means, but it is interesting.

Going right back to the first and fourth comments - on sneezes - I wonder if 'atishoo' in BrE arises from the use in the (BrE version of) 'Ring a Ring o' Roses'.The word a-TI-shoo scans better in the chorus than the more accurate onomatopoeia of a-CHOO:

Dveej up above, you may be surprised to find out that the worldwide age for weaning - and that's averaging in all the children who are never breastfed as well! - is the age of four. Many cultures breastfeed longer than that even! The World Health Organization, of course, recommends that women nurse for two years, and then for as long as it is mutually desirable. The AAP has a similar recommendation.

Breastfeeding, at any age, can hardly be described as disgusting - at least, no more so than it is for any adult, well past the age of weaning, to go and drink the milk from a non-human! (And then to curdle the milk, scoop out the rotten milk solids, and call it cheese. Yummy, but whose bright idea was that???)

And of course it can be brought up normally. Why shouldn't it be? People bring up all sorts of actually disgusting information about their kids (if I have to hear about potty training accidents ONE MORE TIME...!), and nobody says boo, so?

Anonymous at the end, that reminds me of a phrase used in the crafting community. When you have to undo a bit of work, it's called frogging. Why? Because you "rip it, rip it".

Back on the original topic a bit more, all these various "boom" and "bang" noise for guns going off, and yet, whenever I read about somebody reporting on *actual* gunfire they always describe it as a "pop pop pop" noise.

I found this article after a Google search when trying to figure out if there was an AmE equivalent to "pad pad pad." I understand BrE words I see on TV, but this one really makes my brain turn flips as I can't think of an onomatopoeic example for the same sound in AmE. We just say, "I heard footsteps." I wish there were more well-organized information on the subject; I find these nuances very intriguing.

I've never seen 'pad pad pad' as a really conventionali{z/s}ed bit of onomatopoeia, so I haven't got much to say about it, but <a href="http://www.zwol.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1431&sid=012151efe28dd7b07192d4ca04e3b2a1>this forum discussion on how to represent walking sounds</A> might be of interest.

I actually have another theory regarding the etymology of Eeyore. In the Talmud, tractate Rosh Hashana (page 3a), the biblical king Sichon (mentioned in the Book of Numbers chapter 21) is related to the word Siye'ach. Rashi (the famous talmudic commentator) explains that siyeach means eey-yair ben soos in Aramaic. Ben soos in Hebrew means son of a horse, whereas Eey-yeir means a donkey. I guess if it is the son of a horse, then it must be a mule. But still. It sounds too similar to be a coincidence. (I found this blog after I did a google search to determine the etymology of Eeyore, since I thought I had found it after seeing that Rashi said this.)

Since it's onomatopoetic, there is plenty of room for coincidence. Since mules make the same noises across the world, when people from diferentf language groups make imitative name for them, they will sound similar. If you want to find support for your theory, you'll need to determine whether AA Milne knew biblical languages.